National sports teams are drawing from a narrower pool.
After years of preparation, it took just 15 days for England to be knocked out of their own World Cup. Yet the team’s defeats by Wales and Australia reflected something that runs far deeper than a handful of mistakes in the game of rugby: they showed how hard it has become, in sport as elsewhere, for those not among the 7 per cent of the population who attend private schools to reach the top.
Players from independent schools increasingly dominate elite rugby in England. When England won the Rugby World Cup in 2003, only 11 members of the squad had been educated at fee-paying schools. This year, 20 of the squad attended such a school; so did 61 per cent of the English players in the rugby union premiership.
Rugby is “missing out on a wide range of potential players from large parts of the country”, says Andy Reed OBE, the founder and director of Sports Think Tank. “Broadening the base of players and fans would be a real benefit to the game.”
But it’s not only in rugby that former private school pupils are over-represented. Last year a report by Ofsted found that a third of current England sporting internationals had attended independent schools. In both the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, 37 per cent of Team GB’s medals were won by athletes educated at private schools, compared with 26 per cent in 2004.
The England cricket team has become another preserve of the privately educated. Eight of the 11 who played the first Test against the West Indies earlier this year attended independent schools, against just three of the 12 players who won the Ashes a decade ago. In 1987 only one out of 13 players who made the squad against Pakistan hailed from a private, fee-paying school.
Growing up in north London in the 1970s, Phillip DeFreitas learned to play cricket with a tennis ball, an artificial wicket and three concrete nets at Willesden High School.
“It helped me love the game and showed me how much I enjoyed it, which encouraged me to join a club side,” he told me. DeFreitas went on to play 44 Test matches for England, but he fears that this would not have been possible were he growing up today. “I drove by the school recently,” he said. “Those facilities don’t exist any more. It’s a little bit sad, really.”
Under the Conservative governments between 1979 and 1997, more than 10,000 school playing fields were sold off across Britain. A further 200 were sold under Labour between 1997 and 2010. There has been no attempt to replace or reclaim lost fields since.
The dearth of space to play is only part of the problem. Money for physical education and sport for young people has not been ring-fenced. Although the government has set aside £150m for the Primary PE and Sport Premium to help junior schools improve the quality and quantity of sporting activity for pupils, this amounts to only £35 per child. The total is less than the annual £162m awarded to school sport partnerships, which fulfilled a role similar to the Sport Premium until both were abolished in 2010.
Few state schools today have a vibrant sporting culture. Last year, just 13 per cent of head teachers said they expected all students to take part in competitive sport, prompting the chief inspector of schools in England, Michael Wilshaw, to argue that it had become an “optional extra” for many.
The situation outside the school gates does not provide any great encouragement, either. The proportion of people on the lowest incomes taking part in sport has reached its lowest point since Sport England began keeping records a decade ago.
“Sport is becoming less and less accessible,” Andy Reed says. “Social class is now your greatest determinant of access to sports facilities. In lots of deprived communities across the country, facilities have disappeared.”
As local authorities have had their funding from central government cut – the budget for 2016 will be 37 per cent lower in real terms than that for 2010 – they have not given priority to protecting sports facilities. Hire charges are increasing as the quality of free facilities diminishes. Nor does it help that ticket prices are rising and many flagship events are available only on pay TV. Since 2005, all live England cricket matches have been shown exclusively on Sky. After 61 years on the BBC, the Open Championship golf tournament will also be moving to Sky in 2017.
Meanwhile, sport in private schools has been transformed. Coaching and facilities have improved “significantly” in the past 15 years, says David Faulkner, director of sport at the independent Millfield in Somerset. Pupils at the school today enjoy facilities that include a 50-metre pool, a nine-hole golf course and 13 tennis courts. Seventeen former professional sportsmen work as coaches. It’s little wonder that three of England’s World Cup rugby squad, including the captain, Chris Robshaw, attended Millfield. Nearly 50 of the school’s alumni play international sport every year.
Millfield and other schools do offer sports scholarships, but these cannot be expected to change much. Those who get scholarships are often relatively well off – they are “almost self-selecting”, Reed says. Such schemes do nothing for those who develop later in life.
Phillip DeFreitas predicts that the dominance of England’s sports teams by those from private schools will become even more pronounced. He is now a coach at Magdalen College School in Oxford, where parents pay £16,275 a year for children to enjoy his expertise.